Detail from the poster for Hadestown.
Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown is a stunningly urgent allegory for the interconnected crises of our modern world, mapping seamlessly onto the machinery of global capitalism, ecological destruction, and state-sanctioned violence. For those of us deeply entrenched in solidarity work for Palestine—navigating the exhausting but necessary cycles of writing research essays, giving academic talks, and joining protest marches against the ongoing genocide in Gaza—experiencing the play is not a momentary escape into myth. Instead, it is a confrontational encounter with a devastatingly familiar reality.
I went to see this musical for the first time on my birthday, nearing the end of my 60s. It was a year marked with a worsening of ecocide, genocide, and wars everywhere. Yet, it was also a year of profound awakening, as people worldwide confronted the horror of Israeli genocide and apartheid, alongside the out-of-control influence of AIPAC and the Zionist lobby on U.S. politics. The musical’s industrial underworld is not a fantasy; it is a mirror to a global landscape on the precipice of structural transformation.
The Architecture of Ecocide and the Imperial Wall
At the dark heart of Hadestown stands a monument to fear and exclusion, brought to life in the chilling anthem “Why We Build the Wall.” Hades’ wall is a masterclass in the psychology of segregation: it is built to “keep us free” by keeping out the desperate, under the false pretense that resource scarcity is caused by the poor rather than the hoarder. In recognition of Mitchell’s unique ability to weave these deeply political, environmental, and timeless human themes into accessible folk melodies, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2020.
The stage she constructs maps directly onto the brutal geography of our world. It is the very same imperial logic that animated Donald Trump’s border wall against Mexican and Central American migrants. It is the structural twin to the apartheid walls built by Israel to fragment Palestinian land, suffocate villages, and choke off indigenous access to vital resources like water and ancestral olive groves. This ecocide—the systematic destruction of the environment to dismantle a people’s ability to survive on their land—is a weaponized tactic of displacement. Whether in the West Bank, Gaza, or the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, the Wall exists to protect stolen abundance by criminalizing the survival of the dispossessed.
Crucially, the fight against this architecture must expand. We must bring change not only to save the peoples of the oppressed “Third World,” but our brothers and sisters in the so-called First World as well, which has become a mirror now to the very destruction it unleashed on the rest of us.
Metropolis and the Grind of Extreme Capitalism
The visual and thematic landscape of Hadestown borrows heavily from the dystopian vocabulary of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece, Metropolis. Just as Lang’s film divided the world between the wealthy elite living in pristine towers and the faceless workers operating the subterranean machine-rooms, Hadestown exposes a system of extreme capitalism designed entirely to serve the interests of the few.
In “Chant” and “Way Down Hadestown,” the workers function as literal cogs. They are stripped of their names, their memories, and their humanity, transformed into a compliant labor force that constructs the very cage holding them captive. Hades is the ultimate CEO (shades of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg Elon Musk)–exploiting Eurydice’s immediate physical starvation to bind her to an unyielding contract. It is a stark depiction of how global capitalism weaponizes poverty, forcing vulnerable populations into survival-driven compliance while a billionaire class accumulates obscene wealth from their subjugation.
Yet, this capitalist control is not unbreakable. We are seeing cracks in the armor. Even within the belly of the beast, recent political primaries in the United States saw the defeat of multiple AIPAC-funded candidates. The inspiring electoral wins of candidates like AlSayed and Angie Dixon, who were outspent 20-to-1 by special interest money, prove that the financial stranglehold of the ruling class can be shattered when communities organize.
Orpheus’s Song (and Macklemore’s): Art as a Tool of Revolutionary Resistance
Against this crushing machinery, Orpheus’s song functions as something far greater than a beautiful melody; it is a radical act of political and cultural resistance. His music acts as a catalyst, momentarily breaking the spell of the underworld, reminding the faceless workers of the sky, the wind, and their own stolen humanity.
This transformation is the precise purpose of revolutionary art. It echoes the historical legacy of the intellectual and poetic archives I explore in my own research for Al Janoub (The Global South), a journal out of Birzeit University in Ramallah dedicated to the shared struggles of colonized and formerly colonized peoples. Orpheus’s melody breathes the same defiant air as the deep intellectual solidarity forged between Pakistani and Palestinian thinkers like Eqbal Ahmad and Edward Said. It carries the rhythmic defiance of poets like Mahmoud Darwish, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Fahmida Riaz, whose verses insisted on liberation across borders. In a world where money, power, and influence gravitate to those who capitulate to billionaires like Robert Kraft—Hadestown instead stands as precursor to the real-life recent removal of Macklemore from the concert tour headlining Ed Sheeran, asking us to make the choice to be a Macklemore–our latter-day Orpheus.
When we sing in the streets during protest marches, we are invoking this exact lineage from Orpheus to Macklemore. During a January 2024 protest march in New York City, I sang the verses of Punjabi Sufi poet Baba Bulleh Shah in honor of the jailed activists of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, calling urgent attention to the Gaza genocide. Singing in fierce solidarity, I explained to the crowd that Bulleh Shah’s timeless invocation to bring the lost beloved back will work its ancient spell and return Palestine to its people.
This is the same spirit of cultural resistance I teach my university students when studying the Jenin Freedom Theatre. Like the characters in Mitchell’s musical, the members of the Freedom Theatre use the stage as a frontline. Despite being repeatedly attacked, raided, and uprooted by occupation forces, the theatre continues to create, proving that the destruction of physical infrastructure cannot kill the spirit of resistance.
As my friend, the social justice activist and operatically-trained singer Lorna Gonsalves, just noted last week at her concert in Peekskill—serving as an introduction to her version of Pete Seeger’s song for Joe Hill (an activist executed for a crime he didn’t commit): “You can kill the person, you can’t kill the movement.” It is a truth that aligns with what Woody Guthrie reminded us of in a time-honored tradition of American musical resistance: “You fascists are bound to lose!”
The Colonial Trap: Divide, Rule, and Self-Doubt
The tragic climax of Orpheus and Eurydice’s walk out of the underground offers a profound psychological insight into the mechanics of liberation struggles. When Orpheus turns around, it is not merely a romantic failure; it is a systemic victory for the oppressor.
The tragedy demonstrates how systems of oppression engineered by the ruling class breed intense self-doubt among those who dare to resist. Hermes reminds us that the primary tactic of power is a psychological one: divide and rule. By forcing the oppressed to question their own comrades, their own strategy, and the possibility of their victory, the colonial apparatus turns revolutionaries against one another. It is an old, calculated colonial strategy designed to ensure that the heavy lifting of subjugation is ultimately carried out by the doubts of the oppressed themselves.
The Break in the Loop: Destruction, Rebirth, and a New World Order
Yet, the ultimate power of Hadestown lies in its refusal to succumb to absolute nihilism. As the curtain falls, Hermes leads the company in restarting the story, explicitly acknowledging that while they know how it ends, they sing it anyway. Like the cyclical trials of Jenin, destruction in Hadestown is not the final word—it is the painful prelude to rebirth.
We stand today at the brink of a profoundly shifting new world order, and the current escalation of global oppression is a sign that the powers that be are running scared. The cracks in the imperial facade are widening. We see rays of hope in the fractures of Western hegemony: in the exemplary, defiant courage of Iran standing against imperial dictates—even as we critique its internal gender politics—and in the armed resistance of Ansarallah refusing to let global trade proceed undisturbed while a genocide occurs. Furthermore, the tangible moves toward Global South unity—manifested in alliances explicitly resisting the dictates of the U.S. dollar—signal that the underworld’s economy is no longer absolute.
Hadestown leaves us not with a guarantee of easy victory, but with a revolutionary mandate. We are trapped in a loop of violence, ecocide, and greed, but the song implies that if we sing it loud enough, march long enough, and build our alliances deeply enough across the Global South, we will finally change the ending.
We must.
All Become Macklemore.
